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Duplicate IDs

11 replies [Last post]
Tim Davies
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I have been amending a copy programme to suit a new project, which has some repeated sections of work. The first thing I have done is amend the project WBS, deleting some branches and renumbering others.

The activity numbering has now changed within the project and I now have many activities with different activity names, but the same ID. As many as four, activities have the same ID. Some are sitting within the same WBS section, others in different sections.

How can this happen? What is the best way to sort this out?

Replies

Zoltan Palffy
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correct answer this is my post at the PMSITE.com

Marian Anyameluhor
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Activity IDs: The SDEF standard does not support activity IDs longer than ten characters, while P6 projects may contain activity IDs longer than ten characters. Activity IDs are truncated to the first ten characters when converting a P6 project to SDEF. Due to this truncation, it is possible that duplicate activity IDs will be encountered during the conversion; if so, the conversion is aborted. To ensure that conversions to SDEF are not aborted, P6 projects should not contain activity IDs longer than ten characters. If activity IDs must be longer than ten characters in P6, the first ten characters must be unique.

http://pmsite.com/forums/viewthread/860/

 

Hope this helps

Henk van der Heide
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Shahzad,

I’m told that the new release of P3e has an undo function.
A negative aspect of undo is that it uses a lot of memory (so im told again). Until now we were forced to make a back-up on regular basis an to be onnest i think it workt very fine. But undo will even be better.

Maybe Primavera has listened a little bid.


Regards

Henk
Shahzad Munawar
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This is generic problem of P3 that during copying and pasting in the same project,you have to alloted other IDS than already placed.

Right so that this duplication of IDS needs to be rectified in new versions.

Not limited to above, previous suggestions such as retrieve the activities after deletion were not considered by P3 Developers so far in any version and same like others functions

so wait when P3 Developers think over this.
Kevin Button
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I have just found that the problem still exists in 4.1. On the Primavera knowledgebase, solution prim15837 says "If a WBS node is copied and pasted within the same project, activities are created with a duplicate Activity ID." It goes on to say that "The problem only occurs when you copy a WBS, then paste it to the same location (without moving the cursor) and if the option to auto-number new activities based on the selected activity is checked."

Hopefully this has been fixed in 5.0

Cheers
Tim Davies
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Thanks Kevin,

Its nice to know that someone else has experienced the same type of problem, especially as it is something as fundimental as duplicate IDs. Its so basic to any database that you don’t have duplicates of a key field.

I guess it could make a difference, which database P3e is running on. I am running a standalone, local installation, so guess I can’t trust the interbase installation. Perhaps it would not be a problem with an Oracle or SQL installation?

Thanks for letting us know that the problem is solved in version 4.1. I guess the same would go for version 5.0!
Kevin Button
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Duplicate activity IDs within a project was in fact a bug in an earlier version. I found this could happen with copy and paste, and when reporting to Primavera with the exact steps I had taken, they acknowledged it was a bug. I am now using version 4.1 and cannot duplicate IDs within a project.
Henk van der Heide
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Tim,

The activity ID has to be unique within your project. But when you copy the project you dont have to change your id’s.
The unique id is created as an combination of the project and the activity id. So when you open two or more projects it looks like you’ve two equal id’s in the project, but this is not possible.

Regards

Henk
Tim Davies
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I had Prefix & Suffix values in already.

So I just tried cutting and pasting all activities, This has renumbered the activities with unique IDs, which will do for me.

Thanks for the help.

Tim
Steven Oliver
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First off, are you sure ?
Could try going to the Enterprise, Projects, Defaults Tab.
Change Activity Id Prefix and Activity Id Suffix values to
annotate new values.
Back to Project,Activity view. Remove all Group and Sort levels. Then do a copy/paste. Your new activities will be annotated with the values you chose earlier. The original values can then be deleted.


HTH

Tim Davies
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I am using Project Manager (Primavera Enterprise - Project Manager)
Release: 3.5.1 SP6

Cheers,

Tim